Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

View of Harbor by Jon Rafman mines the latent cultural imaginary surrounding climate change and society’s collective death drive. In contrast with other recent works that aim to use VR or AR to visualize the impact of climate change, Rafman’s work instead presents the rising sea as an almost anthropomorphized foe, within which strange human-like bodies lurk as the viewer is swept into a kind of watery hellscape. This strong element of fantasy leads the viewer to wonder what type of wish fulfillment is at play—what desire for the museum to be inundated, for the existing social order to be washed away by the deluge?

Film & Video (Film & Video)

dawn chorus ii: el niagara en bicicleta is a work produced in Sofía Córdova native Puerto Rico and was largely shaped by the financial crisis, the islands’ histories under colonial rule and most recently, the climate-change related natural disasters which have affected the island. The latest of which, hurricane Maria, and the subsequent political mishandling of the situation, gave the project its ending. Prior to the hurricane, this work also engaged in conversation with blackness and anti-blackness in the Caribbean, syncretic religion and dance music as modes of survival and liberation, and fantasy and science-fictional strategies as means to break out of our current arc of history.

Photography (Photography)

The Last Riot was originally created for Venice Biennale in 2007. In reference to Baroque Painting tradition and Chiaroscuro, this video installation imagines a dystopian virtual world where bodies removed from conscience and emotion exist weightlessly in a cyber paradigm. Light, shadow and digital manipulation slate a post-apocalyptic world where young teens enact conflict as ritual.

The two drawings in the Kadist Collection are part of a larger series entitled Las Mariposas Eternas (The Eternal Butterflies). They are studies for two large sculptures that explore the role of monuments and emblems in the configuration of Latin American national identities. The first drawing reproduces an equestrian statue of Juan Lavalle, one of Argentina’s independence heroes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

New Town Ghost (2005) is one of Lim’s trio of large-scale video installations. (The other two are S. O. S—Adoptive Dissensus [2009] and The Weight of Hands [2010].) The series grew out of her interest in capturing lost memories and the collective unconscious in rapidly globalizing cities such as Seoul.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sun’s animated film 21 Ke (21 Grams) is based on the 1907 research by the American physician Dr. Duncan MacDougall who claimed the measured weight of the human soul to be twenty-one grams. Sun used this episode—which was not fully recognized by the scientific community—as a point of departure for his depiction of a dystopian world in which the narration of history and notion of time are interrupted. Because each frame was drawn by hand with crayon, it took Sun and his animation studio team a few years to complete this thirty-minute film of a surreal journey through mysterious cities, plagues of mosquitoes, broken statues, cawing ravens, waving flags, and flooded graveyards.